When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and t...hat the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long a...s the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater an...d lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens--women, workers and the members of subject races--to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!--it seems to say,--there is victory yet for all justice; and ...the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women cop...ing with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passion...s to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is nothing to be gained by blaming ourselves and other individuals for family changes. We need to look instead to the broade...r economic and social forces that shape the experience of children and parents. Parents are not abdicating--they are being dethroned, by forces they cannot influence, much less control. Behind today's uncertainty among parents lies a trend of several centuries toward the transformation and redefinition of family life. We see no possibility--or desirability--of reversing this trend and turning the clock back to the "good old days," for the price then was high in terms of poverty and drudgery, of no education in today's sense at all, and of community interference in what we today consider private life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »